Motherboard Review Roundup – Abit, ASUS, ECS & More

• BIOS: MSI P45 Neo3 Motherboard:
  
  

  “MSI put many new technologies into its P45 series to improve the working of GreenPower, which improve temperatures, overclocking and stability. And with features such as active phase switching, enabling phase switching for the memory and chipset, as well as the PWM, the P45 Neo3 should cater for demanding users. Nvidia’s über-high-end nForce 790i Ultra SLI still rules the roost for ultimate performance, but the P45 Neo3 is a reasonable choice if you’re building a solid all-rounder on a budget. While the motherboard is catered to the budget user, its two-phase power supply for the chipset gives it better overclockability compared to the P45 Neo and there are still plenty of storage ports to cater to the enthusiast.”

  
  Click here to read the full review.
  
  
  
• bit-tech: AMD 770X Motherboard Duel:
  
  

  “Abit has been given AMD 770X and tried hard to make a functional, attractive and tweakable motherboard, and despite poor multi GPU performance from the frankly pointless second PCI-Express x4 slot, it has made a board that has a few desirable high end features and overclocks relatively well. At less than £50, it represents a solid attempt at building a well featured budget AM2+ board, just as long as you don't want to bother with CrossFire.
  
  Sapphire has taken the same budget chipset, and surrendered to its low cost nature. Bar the solid state capacitors, cost saving steps have been made all over, from the reduced board size, resulting in cramped SATA ports, to a simplistic cooling solution and an under featured BIOS, the signs are everywhere that this is a budget board.”

  
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• t-break: ECS P45T-A Black Edition:
  
  

  “ECS P45T-A performed decently for such a P45 chipset but it certainly didn’t break any records. We also like the look of the board and with P45 chipset, you always have the option of running a Crossfire setup with its dual PCI-E x16 slots.
  
  Where this board falls behind is the BIOS and overclocking capabilities- a “Black” board from ECS should certainly offer a lot more tweaking that what is currently there. Who knows, a BIOS update might add more functionality, especially CPU temperature monitoring and higher memory frequencies and timing options. Until that is done, this more of a mainstream product than an enthusiast’s option.”

  
  Click here to read the full review.
  
  
  
• X-bit Labs: ASUS Striker II NSE Mainboard on Nvidia nForce 790i SLI Chipset:
  
  

  “It is very hard to make any final conclusions about ASUS Striker II NSE mainboard basing on the benchmark results. Despite a few unpleasant issues it did perform very well in our practical tests. Of course, memory modules compatibility issues or occasional boot-up failures with correct settings are frustrating, but not critical problems. Especially taking into account that this mainboard overclocks processors really well and performs practically as fast as top platforms on Intel X48 Express. And we would definitely recommend ASUS Striker II NSE to all advanced users, if it were not for one thing: this mainboard is based on nForce 790i SLI from Nvidia.”

  
  Click here to read the full review.